the whole idea of Friendster is that you should only meet or be introduced to people that someone you knew and trusted could vouch for. in many cases, these would be people you knew in real life.
people only show up on your list if someone you know knows them or someone they know. unlike, say, LiveJournal, where anyone who happens to come by can see your profile and your (public) journal entries and start bugging you, there's theoretically an additional level of trust/reputation verification screening you from the Great Unwashed Masses (tm).
then, since everyone you see on there should be a friend of a friend (of a friend etc), you can avoid the whole awkwardness and embarassment of getting to know people online, especially (and this is the big part) if you want to eventually translate that relationship from a strictly online one to a flesh-and-blood one.
the advantage here is that someone, somewhere has verified that this person is who they say they are and can vouch for a reasonable degree of sanity. this helps out a lot for online matchmaking, but also for connecting multiple groups of friends through one or two people they know in common also.
i'm not sure how well practice matches theory, but that's the idea, anyway. i know that i've helped undermine the system by adding people (like mononoke, actually) whom i don't actually know for certain are on the level and haven't bothered to verify through a third party, and i know that other people have been far worse about inviting anyone who reads their blog/LJ to add them, which defeats the whole purpose. |
